Despite 40-year sentence, Khadr likely to go home in a year

A military jury at Guantanamo on Sunday sentenced teen terrorist Omar Khadr to 40 years in prison for killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, but the judge revealed after the sentence was announced that Canada had agreed a week ago in a diplomatic note that "it is inclined to favourably consider" Khadr's application to be transferred to Canada next year.

GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba — A military jury on Sunday gave teen terrorist Omar Khadr a 40-year prison sentence for killing an American commando in Afghanistan, but the sentence was merely symbolic — the United States already had agreed to limit Khadr's prison time to eight years, and Canada last week said it would allow Khadr to serve the bulk of his sentence there.

Canada had been cagey in public about its agreement to the deal, under which Khadr pleaded guilty to war crimes. But the military judge at Khadr's trial on Sunday released an exchange of diplomatic notes between the U.S. and Canadian governments that included Canada's assertion that it "is inclined to favourably consider Mr. Khadr's application to be transferred to Canada to serve the remainder of his sentence'' or whichever portion Canada's National Parole Board decides is required.

The note was signed by the Canadian Embassy on Oct. 23, with no name attached.

That agreement will allow Khadr to be released from prison by age 32, if not earlier under Canadian parole provisions.

Khadr, 24, looked straight ahead when the jury foreman announced the 40-year sentence. The widow of his victim, Tabitha Speer, 40, cheered "yes," and then wept.

"He will forever be a murderer my eyes,'' Speer said.

The 40-year sentence, even though it will never be enforced, provided a sense of finality, she said -- along with assurances that Khadr would never be allowed to enter the United States or ride on an airplane.

The seven-officer jury was unaware that Khadr's sentence had already been set before they began deliberating Saturday.

Jurors were told only that Guantánamo's youngest captive had pleaded guilty to five war crimes, including hurling the grenade that mortally wounded Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, 28, during a July 2002 assault on an al Qaeda compound. Khadr was 15.

The Toronto-born Khadr also admitted that, in the days ahead of his capture, he planted mines intended to maim or kill U.S. and allied forces. He was captured near dead, treated by U.S. forces and sent to Guantánamo soon after his 16th birthday.

The Pentagon's Chief War Crimes Prosecutor, Navy Capt. John F. Murphy, said he made the eight-year plea deal with Khadr to secure the certainty of a conviction for the victims of the so-called "child-soldier.''

He cited Khadr's youth at the time of the crime, calling him a "minor.''

"I hope he will be rehabilitated in the future,'' said Murphy.

Khadr's military judge, Army Col. Patrick Parrish, made the plea agreement public moments after the jury was led from the hilltop tribunal chamber on Sunday at about 5 p.m.

The jury deliberated for five hours Saturday, broke for the night, and resumed Sunday afternoon after church services at Guantánamo. While they deliberated, a guard raised and then lowered a flag belonging to an unidentified family member of one of Khadr's victims, a traditional military souvenir from a historic place or time.

Khadr, raised in a militant Muslim family between a suburb of Toronto and Afghanistan, is Guantánamo's last Western-born detainee among the 174 held here. Critics had said he should have been afforded the protections of "child soldier'' and given rehabilitation rather than spend a third of his life at Guantánamo.

Former Army Sgt. Layne Morris, who lost an eye in the firefight that captured Khadr, said he was concerned that an eight-year sentence put the Canadian "on frankly the fast-track to freedom'' and "the prime of his life.'
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Khadr's Canadian attorney, Dennis Edney, lambasted the military commissions process, which has so far yielded five convictions, three through plea bargain.

"We may choose to believe that through his plea Omar finally came clean and accepted his involvement in a firefight when he was 15 years of age,'' he said, "or that this was one final coerced confession from a victimized young man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time because his father placed him there.''

As a convicted war criminal, Khadr was to be moved Sunday night to a single cell in a maximum security lockup where the prison camp staff segregates its convicts.

He had spent the last two years in Guantánamo's most relaxed camp, sleeping at night in a bunkhouse with four other captives and by day praying and dining with at least a dozen at a time.

All the jurors refused through a Pentagon spokeswoman to speak to the 19 members of the news media on the base for more than a week to report the story.

Amnesty International Canada's secretary general called the sentence the latest ``fiasco'' in the Khadr case.

"It comes as no surprise that the sentencing phase and this stunningly punitive jury decision has so starkly highlighted the injustices of this process,'' said Alex Neve, who had been a war court observer.